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Tapping for a Trove

Zyngor | Sunday, August 16, 2015

This is my entry for Sunday, Blaugust the 16th.

In a post during the 2014 Blaugust challenge, I wrote about Trion's Trove, a voxel action/builder akin to the monstrous Minecraft. There appears to be a heavier emphasis on the combat side of things in Trove, yet the mining and building side of things are certainly not without merit as well.

Mine, all mine!

During the remainder of the beta (it officially launched July 9th) and since then, Trion has been working hard to implement new classes (currently sitting at 11 choices), new biomes (such as a sickeningly-sweet candy land and a pirate-infested high seas), and new dungeons to co-exist within all of the biomes. With the success of their other titles (RIFT probably being one of their biggest), Trion does a nice job merging the F2P aspects of a game that players, like myself, appreciate, with the necessary premium and convenience options that are required to let the fine folks at Trion enjoy their supper at night.

Trove is no exception. All classes are purchasable in-game with either credits (cash currency) or cubits (earnable premium currency), and most shop items that are credit-only are really just convenience or cosmetic goods. You can pick up fast mounts either in-game (craftable, sometimes find one in a treasure cache), or a cubit-purchased mount in the store. Complete dungeons to fill that meter on the top-right of your screen - doing so will net you a nice sum of daily cubits. The weekend bonus currently includes 100% cubits, so you can get 1000 cubits daily on the weekends rather than the usual 500.

No candy land would be complete without its own mega treat-sized dungeons!

Each biome has its own flair, with fully themed enemies, dungeons, and loot. Enter a desert biome, and you may run across large train dungeons and face frontier-inspired enemies (that Saloonbot Mayor can be a feisty one). Hop over to the Neon City biome, and you might think you've just entered the land of Tron - all sorts of robots are waiting to rip you to pieces meet your acquaintance. Some of the newer biomes, including Candoria and Treasure Isles, help to flesh out this thriving world, and feature all sorts of fun enemies and dungeons to explore.

From the hub (central area in Trove that acts as the place you'll spawn in login) offers the player the ability to hop straight into a world, as well as other portals for areas such as club worlds (housing for the "guilds" in this game). If you head straight, you'll see a tower with several portals - enter the one that best fits your level. These go up to level 10 - once you have surpassed this, you can craft higher-level "uber" portal and place them in your cornerstone.

You feelin' lucky, punk? Well, are ya?

Developing your cornerstone is recommended to at least get some bare essentials in, but not necessary if it isn't your thing. You may use the facilities at other users' cornerstones should you pass them in your adventures, but I'd still say to at least get as many of the facilities as you can for your own plot of land. At least get a rejuvenation station in place to replenish your health flasks.

Crafting works quite well as long as you are gathering the various bits of ore and stone along your journeys. Whether you are building something to cosmetically improve your cornerstone, or boosting your gear through forges, crafting is integrated into most parts of the game. Even just by deconstructing unneeded gear at the Loot Collector, you can create a catalog of styles to change your character's look, whether it be their hat, face, or weapon. Plus, doing this will get you additional crafting materials and mastery points, the latter of which will reward you with various passive bonuses and goods (including cubits, credits, and mounts/boats/wings).

You can switch up your class at anytime by pressing "J". Inventory, mastery, and anything gathered in the Collection ("B") are shared across characters, with restrictions only placed on the weapon type your respective class uses (ie gunslingers use guns, knights use swords, ice sage use staves). Read the little info button for each class for some details, or check out the Trove fan wiki page here (search within that wiki for other info - seems to have plenty available).

So is THIS where the rum has gone?

I would recommend completing as much of the tutorial quests as you can, as these will net you cubits to spend on some new classes. You'll probably see "SA" mentioned a lot in the in-game chat - these are Shadow Arenas, basically end-game dungeons that require a special craftable key to access, and plenty of teamwork. I have not gotten around to doing one myself, but it seems to be the thing to do to attain some of the top-end loot.

Most of all, just have fun. Trove really plays as a very casual experience, and even when you get up there in the levels and are frantically running around in the Uber-tiered levels, there's just something fun about running into murderous cupcakes that'll put a little smile on your face. The world feels inviting to delve into and explore, and I think this is exactly what Trove is all about.

4 comments:

This has been my experience when recently playing in Trove. It's been very casual friendly and I'm getting a joy of exploring each of the biomes. Which class are you enjoying the most? Do you prefer one of the biomes over the others? I tend to stick with the volcano one, and just recently came across the neon city biome.

So far, I've probably been enjoying the Gunslinger the most (out of playing Gunslinger, Knight, Ice Sage). I do have enough cubits to pick up 3-4 classes, so I will probably go ahead and pick up one or two more in the near future. I'll likely pick up one of the classes that uses a bow, so I can start collecting that weapon type to grind down for more mastery points.

I don't really have a favored biome atm - they're all pretty much a good time. I am a fan of the candy biome just for the mere silliness of it, so that's a thing.

The colorful casual carefree nature of Trove is a big draw to me too. It's refreshing to find a game where just running around knocking out enough dungeons to fill your Star Bar, and seeing the sights along the way, is pretty much the central gameplay loop, and doesn't take up too many hours of the day.

It's kinda amusing that my first impulse on seeing the purple cheese textures in the first screenshot was "I need to fling two bombs into it, right now!" Trove conditioning status: successfully addicted.

Oh yeh, Trove is a great one to fill those bits of open time in your day. I'll admit it took me awhile before I found out about bombs, after which I tried to figure out how much time I've been spending lazoring away at blocks...at least Shapestone mines quickly enough.